


Charm is Mrahc Spelled Backwards

by pir8fancier



Series: Do I or Don't I? [4]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-10
Updated: 2014-08-10
Packaged: 2018-02-12 15:27:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2115054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pir8fancier/pseuds/pir8fancier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rodney is okay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Charm is Mrahc Spelled Backwards

**Author's Note:**

> For sgamadison, whom I heart muchly. What do you do when you're stuck in LA EX for three hours on a layover? You write mcshep.

Rodney’s head didn’t even hit the floor John moved so fast. “Did you fucking eat this morning, McKay?” he muttered, even though he’d personally watched Rodney wolf down enough breakfast for three people and enough coffee for five. He shoved two fingers against Rodney’s neck. No pulse. No goddamn pulse. He pressed harder. Nothing.

“Code blue!” he shouted at the crowd gathering around him. “Defibrillator,” he screamed as he grabbed the bottom of Rodney’s tee-shirt and ripped it open from the neck to the hem. Rodney’s ribs gave way during the second round of chest compressions, but John kept going until someone shoved him out of the way and began attaching the electrodes. Holding Rodney’s head in his lap with his fingers tight against Rodney’s neck he kept up a running dialogue in his head, as if Rodney could hear him.

 _Look you asshole you do not get to do this we are just at a point where okay they’ve got you hooked up and they are going to zap you and thank god you’re out like a light because I broke at least two of your ribs and that will hurt like a motherfucker when you buck against the charge and this guy knows what he’s doing must have been in Iraq maybe the first go around based on the gray hair he’s a pilot based on his insignia and it’s yet another pilot hauling your ass our of the fire come on Rodney goddamnit come on!_

Rodney bucked in response to the first zap. Pilot-defibrillator-operator guy looked at John. John still couldn’t feel a pulse. At John’s terse shake of the head, they zapped Rodney again, and this time he responded. It wasn’t a strong pulse, a little thready, but it was there. John gave a thumbs up. Before he could even say anything, there was an ambulance crew and a gurney and they had a drip going and John barely had time to give the guy who’d saved Rodney’s life a salute. But he took those two seconds even as the ambulance techs were racing Rodney down the corridor to a waiting ambulance. Because brothers in arms.

******************************

It wasn't until John was sixteen that he realized he possessed, for lack of a better word, charm. That it was something special that others didn't have. He could fuck up—like that time he and Mikey White had filled all of the spigots in the chemistry lab with crazy glue so that they could get out of class that day—and ninety-nine percent of the time John would get by with a wrist slap. For example, Mikey got detention, whereas he was basically given a pass, only having to write a twenty-page paper on the chemical composition of crazy glue. Sure, Mikey bought the glue and it was his idea, but still. And it wasn't like John was trying to get out of getting detention, because anything was better than spending three hours in chem lab being overseen by their chemistry teacher, Mr. Chalmers, whose halitosis was so bad it could trigger projectile vomiting should you get a whiff.

And then there was that time that he, Luke Harding, and Charlie Flushing created crop circles in the quad. Like previously, he was up to his frigging neck and certainly as culpable as his cohorts in “crime,” as John had devised the design and had directed Luke and Charlie, who mowed themselves into suspension; John merely got probation. His entire career at Choate was like that, and given that the school was populated by boys whose parents were at least as wealthy and privileged as his were, he could only put it down to one thing: John had something those other boys didn't.

One day you opened your personal toolbox and saw something you had no idea what it did, but you were going to find out. And this tool turned out to be so damn cool. He could stop bullies without humiliating they so that he didn't get beat up later, and he could coax smiles out of the grumpiest people, and, even better, he could get people to do things they really didn't want to do because he could smooth talk them into it. Then he entered the military, and it not only became cool but a goddamn life saver. By now he didn't even need to think about it. It wasn't calculated, but it was certainly part of his skill set, like his ability to fly. He also knew that his looks and physique—which he also learned how to manipulate to his advantage—were part of the package. Throw in his 15-20 vision and his truly envious hand-eye coordination, and John had an arsenal of survival tactics that had worked pretty well up until now. Charm was power, which was never a bad thing when people were trying to blow your head off.

John's cool, easy charm hid what was actually a rather taciturn, conflicted man with a lot of anger. Rodney wasn't fooled by the lazy smile—that it hid a lot of rage. More often than not kids of alcoholics are angry, but John was doubly “blessed,” with a father who was a perennial gold-medal winner in how to humiliate and verbally abuse others. His mother’s alcoholism and his father’s verbal abuse resulted in an emotional cocktail largely composed of fury toward his father and complimented by the twin “olives” of regret and guilt regarding his mother. Anger wasn't his brew of choice in the “bar” of life, but it was the drink he was often served. 

The weird thing was that Rodney was immune to John’s charm. He wasn’t one of the haters—although initially it might have begun to play that way—but a few missions and a couple of near-death-by-Wraith experiences later, and their friendship was cemented in a real sense of trust and respect, despite John’s martyr complex and Rodney’s epic social fail. Rodney’s friendship (and now relationship) with John had nothing to do with John’s physical wow and his ability to charm the birds out of the trees. Rodney just didn’t see it. Oh, he sort of saw it as an abstract, which fed Rodney’s jealously because he thought John was seducing every woman on the base who wasn’t military—fairly hilarious given John’s sexual orientation—but it didn’t play into how he felt about John. John couldn’t charm Rodney no matter how much he tried. Perhaps Rodney was too intelligent or too arrogant or just too, well, Rodney to buy into John’s shtick. John could count on five fingers the people who actually got him, knew him as much as anyone could know him, and accepted him: Elizabeth, Teyla, Ronon, Lorne, and Rodney. Not even Nancy had “known” him, and when she discovered who he really was, she still loved him, but she didn’t want to be married to him anymore. John couldn’t blame her. He had a lot of baggage she didn’t want to carry. Rodney willingly hauled a tremendous amount of John’s crap around with him as a matter of course. Sure, he complained every single step of the way, but no matter how much Rodney groused, he did it and did it willingly.

Rodney's somewhat legendary refusal to acknowledge or recognize (or care) when he was insulting and alienating people didn’t apply to John. Just the opposite. Often Rodney would insult every single person in a room—deliberately or just through sheer obtuseness—and yet he would say to John as they were walking out the door, “What's got your boxers in a twist?” And Rodney would be right. John would have been smiling, joking around with people, back-slapping, and doing what most people do when projecting that things were just peachy, all the while secretly hiding his fury behind a twinkle and a closed-mouthed grin.

The sucky thing about the charm was that it failed him at critical junctures in his life. It was an inverse thing. People loved John or they hated him. There wasn’t anything in between. Sumner was an example. Had the guy not been lunch for the Wraith Queen, he would have hated John the entire time John was under his command, no matter what John did. The charm worked so much of the time that when it didn't, John was always a little nonplussed, but that was where a Glock and a bunch of C4 came in handy. Not that he had either when he confronted the CCU charge nurse who wouldn't let him into see Rodney.

*******************************

“Look, Dr. McKay is my colleague. I want to be there when he wakes up. Will you let me in?” John pointed at a sign on the door that said, “No Admittance” in gigantic red letters.

The nurse looked at John, looked at the sign, and then returned to scrolling on his tablet, replying in a bored voice; like this was the 826th time he said that this week, “Are you related?”

“Maybe in a past life?” John joked, “Maybe I didn’t make it clear the first time around. He's my colleague.”

“Sorry,” the nurse replied in an insincere voice and looked up to cast a disapproving eye over John's rumpled BDUs. His name badge said he was one David Harkness. The picture was taken at least a decade ago, because this guy was now carrying at least an additional fifty pounds. It was kind of ironic that he was working in a cardiac unit, because he had mottled flush on his cheeks that meant that he'd just had great sex or was working on his own heart attack. John was betting on pending heart failure. “He's in a medical coma while we stabilize him. Probably for the next few days. Why don't you go back to base? Wherever that is.”

John had no idea what had gotten this guy's nuts in a full-throttle tizzy, but the disapproving vibes emanating off of him were nearly singing the eyebrows off of John's face.

“We were here for a meeting with a congressional panel, Dave. Base is on the west coast. Please.” John did the “smile,” but given the thinning of this jerk’s lips, it only ratcheted up his instantaneous, and by now mutual, profound dislike of John.

“Mr. Harkness to you, pal. Sorry, no can do...” he replied in a snotty voice, paused, and flicked his eyes again over John, looking for some clue to John's rank.

“Colonel. Colonel John Sheppard,” John supplied with a deliberate edge. He rarely pulled rank, but he was going to get into that room.

For a split second Harkness’s flushed cheeks paled, and then he locked eyes with John. Whatever he saw there made him double down.

“No can do,” he repeated in an even snottier tone. “You are just going to have to wait, Colonel. I'll instruct the nurses to give you updates of your colleague, Dr. McKay, every two hours. Out here.” He pointed in the direction of the waiting room. “There’s an orange chair with your name on it.” With that he turned toward the door, pushed some buttons on the keypad with such speed that John couldn't follow, and slipped behind the door. The last thing John saw was a little wave of his fingers before the door banged shut behind him.

As rare as it was to use his rank to get what he wanted, it was chump change compared to John pulling strings. He never pulled strings. It was the M.O. that defined his father’s world, the I-know-people bullshit that was nothing more than a gigantic circle jerk of privilege and money. The gift that kept on taking. John could wait until the shift changed and try his luck with another charge nurse, but John didn’t want to. He wanted in that fucking room right fucking now. John flipped open his cell phone and called Cheyenne.

******************************

They kept Rodney in a medical coma for a solid week. If he got through the first three days, his chances were excellent of surviving until they could do a triple by-pass on him. John didn’t leave Rodney’s side the entire time. He slept in a chair, his hand over Rodney’s, willing Rodney’s cells to heal, to divide, and do all those things they should do. The nurses began to take pity on him, and let him order meals: “What would Dr. McKay like for lunch today?” Dr. McKay, being on a solid diet of saline and heparin, didn’t want anything, but John ate a lot of bad hospital food that was heavy on the protein so that he could be what Rodney needed him to be when he woke up.

John had lost what little faith he had somewhere between Iraq and Afghanistan, but he did believe that there were higher powers of some sort. Not that they’d created humans in seven days or anything like that, but when you can have a sort-of conversation with a physical city, then it opens up a whole lot of possibilities. So he talked to Atlantis. About cell division and atrial fib and heart bypasses and heart muscles and how Rodney was now on a Cheeto-free diet for the next forty years. The only person he knew to call other than the Atlantis crew was Jeannie, who was nine months pregnant. Flying to D.C. from Vancouver was out of the question. She called four times a day for the update—“He’s still in coma, Jeannie"—and when she didn’t call on the sixth day, John knew she was in labor.

Someone in the airport had collected the bags they’d left behind and had had the courtesy to send them to Walter Reed, so John had Rodney’s laptop, and he used that week Rodney was comatose to read everything he could on heart attacks, triple-bypasses, and medically induced comas. He was so well read by the time Rodney woke up that Rodney’s doctor asked him if he had an M.D. because John was so knowledgeable.

They brought Rodney out of the coma on day seven. John watched Rodney’s eyes flutter for about forty minutes as he fought to wake up. When Rodney did finally open his eyes for good, they were the same amazing blue they’d always been. Had John ever seen anything so goddamn wonderful?

“What happened?” Rodney’s voice was gravely and a little slurred, like he’d been asleep for a week.

“Heart attack,” John squeezed Rodney’s hand and got a weak squeeze back.

“Fuck, my ribs hurt like hell,” Rodney groaned. “How long was I out?”

“Not long. They zapped you pretty quickly." No point in mentioning just yet John breaking his ribs while doing CPR. "A few seconds. Doubt you lost any brain cells.” John knew that this would be the _first_ thing Rodney would care about when he woke up.

“It doesn’t take more than a few seconds,” Rodney replied with only the barest hint of his old bite. Pre-heart attack Rodney’s voice would have been _scathing_.

“527,835.”

Rodney closed his eyes but said in a weak voice, “Not prime.”

They played for another ten minutes before Rodney fell back asleep.

******************************

_TBC_


End file.
